McCarthy's Day

Buried beneath the news of 30+ dead in Blacksburg, we learn that Cormac McCarthy has won the Pulitzer prize for his work of fiction, The Road. Fitting, somehow, for this strange April — with all its snow flurries and violence.

As a new father, I read The Road with a box of Kleenex. Imagine a post-apocolyptic setting. Think dirty snow, ash, and greyness. And yet little lights burn within a father and son as they make their way through the sunless world. A few beings, once-human, scavenge the wasteland desperate enough to become thieves, even cannibals. And yet the love a father for his son takes them through weeks of shivering, filth, hunger and thirst, down a long road that may offer nothing at its end. Where McCarthy's world should have no meaning, it somehow does. Read it.